Chapter 6: WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?: Cultivating Connection and Challenging Self-Interest

Teaching economics provides a wonderful opportunity to guide students in examining how their decisions affect their own well-being and the well-being of all the many beings around them. Economics is a social science, a study most often focused on how we “truck, barter, and exchange” in order to produce better outcomes for ourselves and others. Not surprisingly, most of the discipline’s focus has been on individual’s own self-interest; courses tend to concentrate on market outcomes that benefit the individual with external effects on others being unimportant for economic decisions. Adam Smith famously invoked “the butcher, the brewer, and the baker” to illustrate that the raw pursuit of each person’s own self-interest benefits all (Smith, 2007). The first and second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics are basically statements of this mechanical and natural correspondence (under strict conditions) of individual and social welfare maximization.